


Unhoped for in the World

by the_rck



Series: All the Faces We Were [5]
Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gaia Hypothesis, Guilt, Introspection, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Pragmatic Idealism, Sacrifice, Supervillains, ruthlessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 20:30:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13061595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Layla knew that Will and Warren had both made choices, sacrifices really, to be with her. She only let herself feel guilty about those choices late at night when she was walking alone. Somehow, she could confide that to the Earth when she couldn’t to her partners.Possibly because the Earth didn’t think it mattered, and then, amazingly, it didn’t.





	Unhoped for in the World

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet XLII in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
> 
> Thanks to Elizabeth Culmer for beta reading.
> 
> This one is a bit unanchored in time, but most of it, probably all of it, is before From My Heart's Ground, and all of it is definitely after And Love Is Fire. I'm keeping the stories in the order that I wrote them rather than trying to renumber things by internal chronology.

Sometimes, it helped Layla when she remembered that there really was something bigger than herself or the causes she pursued. The Earth would always hold her, even when she couldn’t carry herself any more, and would always renew her strength when she faltered.

Matters of astronomy and the physics of the larger universe were beyond Layla’s control. The Earth would endure as long as those allowed and would birth life in whatever way current circumstances dictated. Humans, all of them ever, were much smaller than they thought they were. She knew that. She had always known that.

Layla could influence. Layla could protect. Layla could choose. She just knew that, without Warren and Will, the Earth would bear nothing for her. She could survive that. She had resigned herself to it. To becoming something other than human. 

She will always be so very, very glad that she didn’t have to live it.

*****

Layla knew that Will and Warren had both made choices, sacrifices really, to be with her. She only let herself feel guilty about those choices late at night when she was walking alone. Somehow, she could confide that to the Earth when she couldn’t to her partners.

Possibly because the Earth didn’t think it mattered, and then, amazingly, it didn’t.

Both Will and Warren thought she didn’t understand the price they were paying, but she did. Any time she got too close to saying it, they’d both get very quiet and find a way to change the subject, so she went for the small things and tried to listen for the lines they wouldn’t cross.

Couldn’t cross, really.

Will could handle being in the room with them when they talked about tactics, anything very focused on specific actions, even if they were planning an assassination. As long as they didn’t call it ‘murder.’ Any mention of strategy, especially ‘acceptable losses’ or the reasons why they were choosing particular targets, made his face go blank and stiff. She no longer tried to keep him from leaving the room then, no longer tried to explain or to talk it out.

Warren never had tried.

And Will would be fine later because it wasn’t that he didn’t know. He just couldn’t be near them when he let himself think about what they were doing, what he had decided to let them do. That that was still true after eighteen months eased some of her worries about him losing the parts of himself that he wanted to keep.

Neither she nor Warren ever let Will know how hard it was each time they crossed another line and did something Will would hate for the first time. Intellectual decisions were very different from visceral ones, and she’d been sick the first time Warren killed someone. Smelling it was very different from watching at a remove the way she did when she told her plants to kill, and it was Warren. He was never supposed to--

Finding Warren’s line had come then, and it was much harder to manage than Will’s. Warren couldn’t handle Layla regretting the inevitable consequences of actions she didn’t regret in the least. He didn’t mind her trying to mitigate the collateral damage; that was one of his concerns as well. He just couldn’t bear it when she cried over the dead they’d left behind.

“Either we do this, or we don’t,” he told her after the first time he killed directly and deliberately. The way he held her told her that it was more for his comfort than hers.

On his own, Warren would never have chosen to be a villain.

Layla had wanted a man dead, and Warren had made it so. She forced herself to smile at him until he believed her. “No regrets.” 

She gave those to the Earth during her midnight walks, too. If she shed tears or prayed or let her consciousness spread until she was-- temporarily-- no longer Layla Williams but rather the Amazon basin or the entire continent, Warren wouldn’t know.

Being human hurt so very much.

But the second time was easier.

*****

She gave Warren her complete trust and gave Will all of the sweetness and tenderness she had in her. It wasn’t enough, not nearly what they deserved, not for either of them. They thought it was, though, and she was never going to tell them they were wrong because she needed both of them. She would give them everything she had to spare.

She needed Warren because Warren knew how to make everything work. He’d even thought to find them a _dentist_ when he started planning. He’d understood that the money he’d started with could be used up, and he’d taken steps to make it grow instead.

They joked a little about investment management when they attacked companies and then invested in them, but it was also sound strategy because every bit of money going in gave them a little more subtle influence over corporate policies. That had been Warren’s idea.

And Will was happier about the investing because he didn’t see the ways in which death still came from it. Neither Layla nor Warren ever told him what it paid for or what terrible things those corporations still did.

Warren needed Will as much as Layla needed Warren. Layla’d been surprised to realize that but supposed that it made sense of the trouble Warren had gone to to persuade Will to let himself be kidnapped. Warren seemed to think he’d done it for her or, somehow, for Will, himself. Layla and Will both knew better. They never talked about it, but they knew.

Will kept Warren balanced and aware of himself as separate from Layla and-- more importantly-- as separate from Barron Battle. Layla hadn’t even thought that that might be a problem, and she probably wouldn’t have noticed the damage until after it was too late.

While they had been waiting for the helicopter to take them away from the Stronghold cabin, Warren had joked about using his father’s last name to become ‘Battlefire,’ and Will had punched him hard enough to leave a mark. Warren had staggered, and Will had said, “That’s for being stupid.”

Then they’d looked at each other as if they’d settled some matter between them. Warren never again mentioned wanting to be known as anything but Flashfire.

Layla hadn’t realized until much later that the words hadn’t been a joke or that Will’s response had been anything but a last test to see if she and Warren really would keep their word about not hurting him. Even if she had realized, she was pretty sure that without Will, Warren would have become Battlefire simply because she wouldn’t have known that he could be-- that he _should_ be-- stopped.

Will had known. Will thought he was bad with people, but he saw things like that that no one else noticed. Any other fourteen year old boy would have gone to homecoming with Gwen Grayson.

Will actually forgiving Warren for drugging him had taken a lot longer. He could love Warren and protect Warren, but forgiveness had been much harder. 

Will never brought up all of the ‘research’ trips he’d helped her with before, back when he didn’t know, so she assumed he still hadn’t actually forgiven her for those. She’d known, even then, that he probably wouldn’t. 

That, of all of it, was something she kept and carried and always would.

*****

It was only because Layla had Warren that she had anything to give anyone. Warren and his dentist and his personal assistant and his accountant and… Who knew that effective supervillains needed bureaucratic support? Will had been as surprised as she was but had adapted faster.

She wanted Will-- too much to give him up-- and told herself that it wasn’t need, just love. She thought he knew it and suspected that he wouldn’t have chosen to stay with her if Warren hadn’t needed him. Not that Will loved Warren more than he loved her, just that Will had paid and would pay a much higher price for his choices than either Layla or Warren ever would. Love and want wouldn’t have been enough.

She was glad that Warren needed Will, so that she could have them both. Leaving Will behind would have been like leaving part of herself-- not a part she couldn’t do without, but still.

Layla would have kept her soul even without Will. Not without Warren, but she could have gotten by without Will. She was sure of it. 

Warren wouldn’t have. She was equally sure of that and tried very hard not to look at what it said about her that she’d have let him do it anyway. Because they had Will, she hadn’t had to.

At least the Earth didn’t care. It took and swallowed those regrets as easily as any others, and flowers bloomed.

*****

Will never tried to remove the suppressor. He tended to rub it with his left hand when he was thinking about might-have-beens and especially when he looked up at the sky, but he didn’t try to get it off of his wrist. She thought he had to know that he could, that all he had to do was to say, “Poison Ivy 1-2-3.’ His voice command would work for that as well as hers or Warren’s.

“Will won’t test it until his back’s against the wall,” Warren had told her. “Not unless someone’s going to die if he can’t use his powers.” Warren had looked at his hands for a moment before meeting her eyes again. “If he knows he can take it off any time, then he can’t excuse staying with us because it becomes a choice. That’s also why he’ll never ask us to let him go, not unless he means it.”

She’d never understood that but had taken it on faith that Warren was right because he usually was about Will. She’d worried for a while that Will would say the words accidentally, but Will had been right, too. It wasn’t really something that would come up in conversation.

She gave Will’s losses to the Earth, and the trees bore fruit.

*****

About a year after they moved to the base, Warren had simply declared the three of them married. 

Layla had tried to persuade him that it wasn’t necessary and that, really, the whole institution of marriage was about property rights which weren’t ever going to be applicable. It wasn’t the idea of permanence that bothered her so much or even the words. It was the underlying assumptions about what was important.

Will had simply shrugged and said that he’d already figured they were.

Layla had cried, alone, by her favorite tree that night. She couldn’t let Will or Warren see, but the tree wouldn’t tell them that, much as she loved them, she really would sacrifice them both if she had to.

The tree spread her tears as far as its roots could reach. The Earth didn’t reprove her for wishing her priorities went the other way.

*****

Anyone allowed on the base knew that Will was to be protected and to be provided with anything he asked for. He’d tested that once or twice. At least, a test seemed the only likely explanation for him demanding exactly seventeen anacondas and supplies to care for them. Being Will, he was careful not to harm the snakes, but he clearly was neither interested in nor fond of them.

Then he talked to the R&D people, just wandered in and started a conversation in spite of not really having a common language with them. As far as Layla could tell, they mostly used gestures because Will had no Portuguese. The trio of R&D employees had about thirty words of English between them because, at that point, all Warren had found were two twelve year olds and their mother, all technopaths, all self taught, all learning what they could actually do with access to money. 

Will spent hours teaching them how to use equipment he’d used once or twice in school and discovered that, while the girls were literate in Portuguese, their mother wasn’t. Will gave over care of the snakes to the girls while he learned Portuguese and their mother learned to read.

As far as Layla could tell-- she didn’t ask Warren-- Will hadn’t been bothered when he realized that his snakes had been altered. He congratulated the kids and had them show Warren what they’d done. From that time forward, he’d come up with odd things to throw at all three technopaths. He compared it to an Iron Chef competition when Warren asked. An ingredient a week to see what wild things each team member could come up with.

When Sofia and her daughters left to work in the field, there was some cutthroat competition for Will’s attention, and he started working with the three candidates who’d been labeled by the betting pool as least likely to attract his interest. 

Layla didn’t see any way that Will hadn’t known which way the betting was going. 

She didn’t realize, until Warren pointed it out, that Will didn’t care about-- didn’t trust mostly-- the people who were already experts. “I’m pretty sure he knows he’s helping,” Warren told her privately. “It’s just a little teaching, something that needs doing and that we don’t have anyone else for. He’s helping individuals who aren’t-- He lets himself forget what they’re going to do with what they learn. Eventually, though… He can’t keep from seeing it forever.”

Layla suspected that Warren was underestimating Will’s ability to keep looking away.

Will even wrote up reports. They talked about the classes each person needed, the things Will knew of but couldn’t teach. What happened after that was up to HR-- Layla never quite got over the weirdness of running an organization, much less one big enough to have an HR department-- and usually both cost a bundle and left the employee (Will didn’t like having them called minions) better trained, more ready for responsibility, and very, very loyal.

Will never mentioned whether any of his students had offered to try to remove or disable the suppressor. Layla assumed one or two must have. Warren’s bet was that only one or two hadn’t.

When Layla cautiously asked Will how he felt about what his former students became, all Will had done was quote Tom Lehrer. “When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down!” He’d held her eyes for several seconds as if daring her to take this away from him, too. “It’s not my department.”

Layla understood both messages and explained them to Warren who had somehow never heard of Tom Lehrer. Werner von Braun, yes, but not Tom Lehrer. She didn’t really believe Will meant it, but she could explain it.

And Will must have confused her with Warren. Warren would stop Will from crossing his own ethical lines. Layla… couldn’t, not the soft lines, anyway, not the places where Will might adapt. The reason she didn’t push was that Warren told her not to.

People started out afraid of Warren, came to fear Layla, and eventually realized that, if Will saw a problem, they’d be gone. Layla wished they could actually put Will in charge of HR, but Warren had told her that they couldn’t. Any official position would cross the line into collaboration, at least in Will’s mind.

Layla thought the distinction was nonsensical, but she didn’t argue with Warren about Will.

The Earth didn’t take her wishes. Those floated free until they finally escaped the atmosphere and vanished, beyond all reach.

*****

So Will taught, Warren managed, and Layla set policy. Layla took pains not to let either of her partners realize that sending their people out on missions that might kill them was the hardest thing she’d ever done. It stayed hard. The only thing harder was the rare occasions when she and Warren encountered Jetstream and the Commander.

Her employees were trusting her not to betray them, not to waste their lives and efforts even though she’d never done this sort of thing before. It was a long leap from theory to practice.

Jetstream and the Commander-- She’d betrayed them a long time ago. She kept betraying them as long as she and Warren held Will prisoner, and they weren’t going to give Will up. She wouldn’t, and Warren couldn’t.

The Earth wouldn’t take that. Layla thought it was because Will and Warren already knew.

*****

During their first year of operations, most of the personnel issues were what Warren called ‘minor discipline problems.’ A handful of employees died in the field, though, and they had to develop policies and rituals for that.

They would have lost more people, except that Warren and Layla were nobodies recruiting the poorly trained, the powerless, and those with a personal stake in their causes. They could remain covert, at least during that first year. The only heroes searching for them were doing it quietly, both to rescue Will and to keep the problem of Warren and Layla inside the community.

No government agencies had taken notice yet. If they’d been found at that point, none ever would have.

Taking the first steps into public villainy had been hard, too, because that was the point when news stories started counting their victims. Layla’d been able to pretend, before, that there weren’t any. She’d mourned the employees lost, but they, at least, had volunteered.

Warren told them both that he’d looked specifically for potential employees who had powers but no training because they were more likely to work cheap, and those savings let him afford the people with no powers but very specialized skills. It was easier, he told them, to find the latter ready-made and to train someone with powers from the basics on up. “We all three know how to do that,” he said. “I have damn-all idea about how to teach someone to be an accountant or a plumber.”

He told Layla, when Will wasn’t there, that it was also because such people were more likely to be willing to espouse Layla’s causes and because most of them had never been documented by the large superhero organizations that would be Layla’s enemies. “Starting with the paycheck and the cafeteria is one thing, but we can’t end there. They have to believe, too. Some of them _will_ die, and I don’t think we want the ones who’d risk it for a paycheck. Most of those would screw us over for a bigger one.”

He never actually said that their people dropping out of sight, their people dying, wouldn’t draw any sort of official attention. Layla had to figure that part out on her own, and she was more than a little surprised that Warren could make that calculation because she wouldn’t have thought to.

She’d been beyond naive.

Of the things she asked the Earth to take from her, that was the one that made her less than she’d thought she was.

*****

She was pretty sure that the ease of finding people considered disposable by those with political power and money was a big reason they were in the Amazon. Warren said that the base had been partly built and abandoned and was therefore considerably less expensive to bring to a usable state, but Layla doubted it was the only reason. There likely weren’t dozens of half-built secret bases and lairs available, but Warren having found more than one option seemed probable given everything else he’d done.

Warren also said that the natural foliage would disguise any changes Layla made because the people with satellites weren’t absolutely sure what they were seeing to begin with. Layla was pretty sure that, if they were going to hide a base somewhere where satellites ought to see it-- which satellites ought to, given the size of the break in the canopy even without vehicles taking off and landing-- they could hide her experiments pretty much anywhere.

But the ease with which they could send people after clear cutting operations was definitely a bonus. Most of their employees had strong opinions about that, and it both eased them into the less than legal parts of the job and gave them a field test.

Not that their employees with powers only came from Brazil or even only from Latin America. Warren had specifically gone looking for people from other places, too. He didn’t have many from the US, Canada, or the EU, not because he hadn’t looked but because those places were more efficient about finding and cataloging everyone with even the slightest trace of power and then funneling them into programs like Sky High.

Layla hadn’t really understood how much work Warren had done-- Supplies and personnel and transportation and organization and finances and... She wasn’t sure the list ever ended---until she started trying to do some of it herself in order to relieve his burden. She was never quite sure if it was some sort of as yet unclassified superpower or if anyone at all-- anyone who wasn’t her-- could learn to do it easily.

She made sure Warren always had the best fruit her plants could provide.

*****

After Warren and Layla started building a reputation as Flashfire and Layla (she still wasn’t going to give herself a pretentious pseudonym; Warren could be excused because he’d chosen his name at sixteen when he thought he’d be a hero), they got more interest from people with experience and status, but those people tended not to understand that money and power were a means rather than an end. Warren had been right about the people who were only looking for a paycheck.

After the first year, there were also occasional would-be spies and a few traitors who thought that the reward for selling them out was worth the risk. Will had asked, begged actually, that spies not be killed. Layla could see that he wanted to speak for the traitors, too, but he didn’t.

She wondered, sometimes, if that was tangled up with how he felt about her and about Warren. If the spies were who he ought to be and the traitors were her and Warren. She hoped not, but she wondered.

Warren had promised a case by case review for spies and then told Layla, privately, that they simply didn’t have the resources to maintain a prison. He reviewed each case anyway, and Layla made sure the bodies were never found.

She buried her doubts with the spies, and the Earth accepted them all.

*****

Will had to know when they lied to him. Each time they did, he never asked about that topic again. Not once. If they evaded, he would press, but he never did with a lie. He couldn’t have done that if he hadn’t known and chosen to accept the knowledge. Each lie was one more burden he carried for their sake, another among so many.

At first, Layla hadn’t wanted to see Will’s pain or to admit that it was inevitable no matter what she did or didn’t do. She’d thought that, if she avoided dealing with him, she wouldn’t be responsible for hurting him. She’d wanted him so badly that some part of her thought that, if she denied herself any joy in him, she’d never hurt him.

Warren and Will had had to work hard to make her understand that her attention-- and Warren’s-- was the only ease Will was seeking. The only option Will had for ease, actually. She’d been right to think that Will would oppose her choices with unyielding purity, but she’d been wrong, too. That purity didn’t guard him from pain. 

Warren didn’t see the terrible darkness of them owning Will because Warren knew that he’d let Will go if that was what Will wanted. Layla knew that, if they did, Will knew more than enough to bring them down. Even for love of Will and love of Warren, she couldn’t destroy her organization and betray the people who worked for her, and letting Will go would mean that.

She was almost certain that Will had seen that from the first and had accepted that it might happen, that she might refuse to let him go later. He’d known, too, that him asking-- ever-- would break all three of them. Because she would say no. Because she’d have to say no. Yes would cost too much.

Layla hated more that Will saw that certainty in her than she hated the fact that it was there at all.

And Will saw that as well, and it cut him deep. He knew that she didn’t love him enough.

If Layla could have taken that knowledge and released him from it, she would have. She was pretty sure that, if she could, Will would have fought her on it, but she’d have done it anyway. He wasn’t going to ask, so she’d never have to refuse. 

All she could offer as compensation was scraps of time and attention, and she knew those wouldn’t-- couldn’t-- quiet pain.

She didn’t think the Earth even noticed Will’s pain, but Layla did and had to live with it. The other choices were worse.

But she made sure Will always had flowers.

*****

Most nights, Layla went for a walk. It didn’t matter where she was. She might only have five minutes, but she walked somewhere away from other humans. If she could touch bare earth, she removed her shoes. If they were at home, she went beyond the perimeter and out among the trees. There was one large tree that she particularly liked. Sometimes, she climbed it. Sometimes, she asked it to keep her clothing for a while so that she could be more fully in nature.

She took Will as far as that tree at least once a week because she knew that he got restless. Climbing a tree wasn’t the same as flying, but it was as close as he could get. She usually left him there while she went further from the base. They both knew that he wouldn’t go deeper into the jungle without her. It would be much the same as suicide, and he wouldn’t do that to them.

And if he tried, she was pretty sure she could find him. 

The Earth would tell her. Will was not something the Earth would take from her.

*****

She couldn’t give much to Will or to Warren, so she looked for small things, possible things. Having them with her, both of them, was a miracle beyond imagining. There were a hundred-- a million-- other, less happy outcomes that had been more likely than the three of them here and together and her still able to save the world. Both of her partners thought that they’d done the only things they could, but she knew better and wouldn’t ever forget.

They gave her back something she hadn’t known she’d given to the Earth.

Will and Warren will keep her human.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I ought to be tagging for 'yes honest they really are villains'. Because they are. Even Will, really, and he knows it. He wouldn't so explicitly link himself to Tom Lehrer's version of Werner von Braun if he didn't know it was true. I don't know. The whole series kind of feels to me a little like that fairy tale with the long line of people stuck to the golden goose with Layla's unyielding principles and ideas about necessity as the goose. None of them _can_ let go.


End file.
